Matt Jones

Kinja Ninja

Kinja is a new web
application that allows users to keep track of their
favourite weblogs and news sources in one easy-to-digest, uh…
digest. While using the site, there’s no mention of technical
terms such as aggregrator, feed, Atom or RSS as it’s designed
for everyone, not just those who understand what those terms
mean.

Developed my Meg
Hourihan with a team of developers, and financially
backed by Nick
Denton, Kinja takes its place as part Denton’s crop of
weblog ventures which includes Gawker, Gizmodo and Fleshbot. Clearly, with these
sites, Denton is trying to bring the weblog format to a mass
audience and make money from advertising as he does it.
Unlike these other sites though, Kinja isn’t edited in-house,
it relies on external content producers and their rss/atom
feeds to populate the site. As a personal tool for feed
aggregation, Kinja’s advertising model seems sound, although
I’m slightly puzzled by this in relation to the Editor’s
Digests; if your weblog is entered under one of the
categories, and your content appears alongside adverts from
which someone else profits, would you be happy about
that?